Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Instructional Design Strategy for Achieving
Alignment

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Which Comes First, Activities or
Assessments?

We have been told all our lives to put things in order. Keep
your tax files in order. Keep your house in order. Alphabetize your index.
Number your chapters. Write the introduction before the conclusion. Yet,
sometimes actually doing things in the order in which they appear as a final
product is not the most effective approach.

Take
course design for example. When we see the finished product of an online
course, we see the objectives followed by activities and resources, and finally
the assessment. While this sequence may be the logical order for the published
course, it is not necessarily the most effective approach for the design
process, especially when alignment is a critical focus.

Quality
Matters (QM) is an organization that has done extensive research on
alignment, the direct correlation between course/lesson objectives and the
activities and materials/resources that support success in demonstrating
accomplishment of those objectives through the assessments. The QM rubric for
assessing this alignment has helped many designers focus their course content
on what the students should learn as opposed to what the instructor wants to
teach. With this focus in mind, the alignment between the objectives and
assessments is imperative. Designing the activities and selecting the materials/resources
become central to this alignment between objectives and assessments. Therefore,
I propose a design sequence that is different from the sequence of the
published course that students see. ﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿

Design Model of Alignment Dependencies

Design the assessments first
in direct alignment with the objectives. If an objective states that the
learner will analyze data, craft the assessment so that the learner demonstrates
data analysis. If the objective states that the learner will create a product,
or research a concept, craft the assessment so that the learner demonstrates
specifically what the objective says the learner will demonstrate. If the
objectives are not measurable and you have the authority to revise the
objectives, then tweak them as you design the assessments. Objectives
will need to be measurable if you are to align the assessments to those objectives.
When alignment is achieved, the objectives will look very much like a
description of the assessments.

Once you have the assessment developed, then you can focus
on developing activities that support the learners' success. With each
activity, such as readings, exercises, gaming, viewing videos and listening to
audio segments, question its inclusion using this criteria: does this activity
support the learner's successful demonstration of the objective through the
assessment? The same criteria holds true for the materials and resources that
you include. Evaluate each one to determine if it moves the learner toward
success in meeting the objective. Without that questioning, designers may find
themselves including interesting materials/resources that nonetheless are not
directly in support of meeting the objectives.

For example, I was designing a lesson once on how to craft
quality discussion forum questions. The objective was for the learners to craft
a question in their content area using the criteria presented in the lesson. I
included a wonderful article on effective forum facilitation. When I questioned
whether the resource supported accomplishment of the objective, I realized it
did not. It was an interesting article on discussion forums, but not on writing
the forum questions. I did include the resource because of its value, but
clearly identified it as optional. By doing so, the learners could look at the
resource if they had the time and interest to do so, but they also were made
aware that the resource was outside the scope of the lesson.

Try this approach the next time you design a lesson, a
course, or a workshop. Design your assessments first to align directly with
your objectives. Revise the objectives as needed so that they are measurable.
Then design activities to support the learner in successfully meeting the
objectives. Evaluate all materials and resources. Do they support the
activities, the assessments? If not, consider eliminating them or identifying
them as optional. Using this process can promote alignment so that learners can
focus on meeting objectives successfully.